Rewriting Landscapes

For much of Australia’s colonial history, the idea of “landscape” has been bound up with possession, extraction and the erasure of First Nations presence. Our visual traditions often reinforced the colonial gaze, which frames Country as empty, picturesque, and available for possession. This exhibition confronts those legacies of Country as backdrop or object, reimagining it as living, storied and sovereign.

The artists in Rewriting Landscapes use the camera to destabilise inherited ways of seeing, offering instead works that are at once deeply personal and political. Their images articulate connections to place that resist surface aesthetics, positioning Country as an active participant in narrative and identity. Ranging from conceptual and critical, to playful and experimental, and defiantly self-determined, these practices dismantle canonical representations while carving out new visual pathways rooted in cultural continuity.

Rather than a reaction to colonial landscape traditions, Rewriting Landscapes is an affirmation: of presence, of perspective, of ongoing cultural dynamism. It celebrates photography and video as contemporary tools for expressing ancestral knowledge, kinship, and lived experience, underscoring how First Nations artists continue to experiment while remaining grounded in Country.

Rewriting Landscapes offers a collective act of rewriting, reshaping and reimagining of visual language.

Feature Image: Libby Harward (Ngugi), 'WARIBUL WAYIRA (hungry waterways)’, 2020. Digital film 2.43sec. Location: Mulgumpin- Lake Carrurra. Courtesy of the artist